The Killer Instinct!

Misty-the mouse slayer!

On this past weekend, my year+ old cat had an epiphany...  She caught her first mouse!
I live in a 100+ old house (renovated of course!), and the basement is separate, so mice in the fall can get in if they are determined. And believe, cold mice can get pretty determined!
So, every fall, they come in, and after about a dozen get caught in the mouse traps and it's done.
Mice are pretty gullible, they can't resist the lure of cheese, so the traps work, year after year... Stupid mice! Learn guys, learn!  Sorry, I digress...
Misty, (the cat!), heard a noise in the kitchen and figured out that it was terribly interesting. I watched her and saw her develop her stalking style, pretty cool.
Finally, the mouse came out and she got it!
You could definitely feel her excitement, and when my son whooped, she dropped it. A first-timer mistake, she'll never do that again!
The result of this is a cat that is totally obsessed...




Undersea Fantasy by me.

She looks at birds out the window, wants to KILL them so she can find out what they taste like! 
She's wandering around wired like she had ten cups of coffee, and only naps intermittently.
And believe me, naps were the point of her day up until now...
Unfortunately, lovely cat though she is, I believe she could go too far on this one...
She doesn't want to sleep at night, she wants back downstairs (NOW!). The mice might come back!




Cat Dreams by Teresa Young

Really, I'd leave her out all night, but she has a bad tendency to destroy plants when not supervised...
I keep telling her, they're not salads, but she isn't listening!

Back to Misty, she can eat, but sleeps intermittently, and as soon as the sun comes up, she figures, at last! And everyone in the world probably knows it's time to rise because of the racket she makes...

I'm really hoping the honeymoon phase ends soon, I'm so definitely NOT a morning person, and cute as she is, this could get old fast;-) 

What's the cure for a mousing obsession?

My Cat Is A Mime...

Today, I'm going to talk about my cat! 

Her name is Nikki and she's a pretty ordinary tabby, as far as tabbies go, in that she lives in my house and never goes outside except to see her 'friend' the vet or to move to a new house. 

 

She's seventeen years old, so she experienced the nineties in her own feline fashion and wasn't so impressed...  No Wall street speculation for Nikki or working in an office wearing sneakers to work trying to make ends meet;-)
 

The 2000's weren't much different for her either, she didn't discover new music groups that she liked or pare down her lifestyle to make herself  'lean and mean'...  In fact, that cat gained weight as the decade went on!  So much for 'doing less with more', Nikki didn't get the last decade at all!

There is one pretty strange thing about Nikki though, she has a birth defect in her vocal cords that interferes with her ability to make any sounds... 

For the first year of her life she never made a single sound at all other than scratching the appliances to hear the sound of her claws or shaking her tail on plastic to hear it rattle! 

I used to call her the 'Mime cat' because it was pretty funny to see a cat go through the motions of meowing with no audio track turned on.  Mind you, there does seem to be some sort of cosmic compensation going on here, as you can hear that cat purr from across the room!

Later on in life, she figured out ways to get around the sound issues a bit... 

Now she stretches her neck up to finally get a strangled sort of drawn out meow out when she really feels the need to be heard...  Sort of a cat version of baying at the moon.

Since it really sounds somewhat like a cat in trouble she generally gets a good reaction, so she must figure it's worth the effort...  Personally, I'd like to find her volume control and turn it back off!  She was pretty well perfect the other way as far as I was concerned!

Did you ever stop and think about cats?  I'm convinced that they see the world very differently than we do, they're pretty sure that they own us and we are staff! 

On top of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that my cat thinks that the level of service has degraded in recent years... She was pretty annoyed by moving from the west coast of Canada out to the east coast.  Nowadays, if you bring out a box and start packing it, she'll look at you like she'd like to give you a little bite to get you to stop... 

I don't blame her though, I figured it out recently and over the last seventeen years, she's moved approximately half a dozen times.  For a cat, that's a lot, they aren't the most flexible pets...  Especially if you consider that she's made the trip by truck across Canada four times!

I remember a funny joke circulating the Internet years ago that I thought was hilarious...  The joke was showing what went on in the minds of dogs and cats with regards to how they see their lives...

--> For the dog, it was all oh boy, a walk, my favourite!  Oh boy, dog food, my favourite! Oh boy... You get the idea...

For the cat, it read like a conspiracy novel! 

The cat went on and on about how the person that was keeping them prisoner was torturing them with horrible gruel while keeping all the good stuff (meat dishes) for themselves...  And on top of that, their captors were eating it in front of them!  It went on to talk about how their latest attempt at assinating their captors failed when they didn't suceed at tripping them to fall down the stairs...  It was pretty funny and I think they caught some truth there!  And I'm a dyed in the wool cat person!  HaHa!

I'm pretty sure my cat would agree!  I think my Mime cat actually thinks she's a tiger...  I'd hate to tell her she's a bit short.

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Tiger Tracks -Apr.2004,  2. Nikki Smiles - 2009,  3. Nikki in her natural state - 2009,  4. Howling (Yawning) at the moon - 2009,  5.  Nikki's Self Image - May 2010.